The Engineer of Success

Around Boeing's spartan hangar-like headquarters in Seattle, they call him the "old shoe," and Thornton Arnold ("T") Wilson, 59, certainly is that. Eight years ago, when he became chairman of the board, he did not bother moving out of his noisy office to more elegant surroundings down the hall. Each morning he sheds his suit jacket and conducts business in a navy blue sweater. When the temperature gets too cold, he can even be seen working in his hat and overcoat. And despite a yearly income in the million-dollar range, Wilson still lives in the same house he bought 30 years ago and drives himself to work in a Honda Accord. Behind the folksy down-home style, though, is a tough, raw-hewn engineer. On his office wall hangs a laminated olive branch, a peace offering from a group of squabbling managers who once exasperated their chairman. When they could not reach a consensus at a meeting, Wilson slammed his folder shut and stalked out, telling them to see him when they had something to talk about. From the time he was in high school in Jefferson City, Mo., Wilson knew he wanted to sell airplanes. Even then, he had the knack for dramatizing issues. He once led a strike by high school students to get a new playground. As the school board was deliberating its decision, Wilson had the school band oom-pah-pah-ing under its windows. He got the playground. He graduated in 1943 with a degree in aeronautical engineering from Iowa State University, where he was captain of the swimming team and a champion at high jinks. On the way home from a meet, he picked up a lady's underpants and stuffed them into his coach's suitcase.

While in college, Wilson planned to join the Army Air Corps, but in his senior year he broke his foot tobogganing.

By the time the foot healed he was a draftsman on Boeing's C-97, a transport version of the B-29 bomber, and was granted a deferment. Wilson took two years out to teach and study aeronautical engineering at Iowa State and Caltech but returned to Boeing in 1948. He was soon impressing top management. Company Chairman William Allen spotted him as a comer and shipped him off in 1952 to M.I.T. for a year to study industrial management as one of the university's highly regarded Sloan Fellows. In 1958, when Allen created a systems management office to coordinate work on the new ballistic missiles Boeing was building for the Air Force, he tapped Wilson to run the Minuteman portion. As project manager, Wilson set up a "management control room" to keep track of the progress of every Minuteman subcontractor. If one fell even a day behind schedule, Wilson would prod it to speed up. Five years later Allen intervened again. During a flight from Washington, D.C., to Seattle, Allen leaned over his seat and asked Wilson to take a job at headquarters. Wilson turned him down, saying that he wanted to stay with the Minuteman until the first test firing because "I had never been in a program long enough to clean up my own mess." In 1964 Allen renewed his offer, and Wilson became head of corporate operations and planning. He quickly scaled the top of the corporate ladder, becoming president in 1968, just before Boeing's brush with extinction, when 747 sales collapsed and the supersonic transport was canceled. In the dark days of the early 1970s he personally sold the Defense Department on the need for four E-4 command post "doomsday" planes that would become the flying White House in case of nuclear attack. Meanwhile, Wilson was cutting the work force to the bone so that Boeing could limp along until orders picked up. Four years later when Allen retired, he was named chairman.

Wilson's private life, in contrast, is quiet. His wife Grace, whom he met as an undergraduate at Iowa State, suffers from severe arthritis. Their elder son Thornton Arnold III, 28, has been deaf since a childhood bout with spinal meningitis and is now a lawyer in the state attorney general's office. Their other son Dan works for Boeing as an engineer on the 767 program. Their daughter Sarah worked for Boeing before her marriage. In his idle hours, Wilson solves crossword puzzles and wrestles with mathematical conundrums, a kind of numerical crossword puzzle.

Wilson pays close attention to his health. He has suffered two heart attacks, the second ten years ago in a Boeing plane aboard a Northwest Orient Airlines flight to Chicago. He takes long walks, swims several times a week at a local community swimming pool and plays customer golf (handicap:

25). He can still shoot a shark's game of pool, a holdover from school days, when he hustled his pocket money in the local pool hall.

Wilson is particularly popular with the rank-and-file workers at Boeing. Around Seattle, everyone who knows him calls him T, which is how he also signs interoffice memos.

Says a union leader: "T will sit down and tell you a few raunchy jokes." But Wilson does not sentimentalize his associates as part of the Boeing "family"; he regards them as a group of competent engineers and draftsmen united for a common cause. "I am grading them all the time," he says. "There is no use patting everybody on the popo when they may be in the wrong environment."

Wilson sets the company standards for first-class engineering. He has surrounded himself with top aeronautical specialists, who had better know their stuff when they make presentations to top management. Wilson grows downright testy at numbers that do not add up or equations that are faulty. The dictum around headquarters: "Wilson doesn't want history. Give it to him on an 8-in. by 10-in. piece of paper and be sure your numbers are right."

Boeing's boss can also be a persuasive salesman. His was one of the first American companies to do business with the Chinese, who ordered ten 707s in 1972. Several weeks ago, as the Pentagon was coming down to the wire on the cruise missile contract, Wilson left for Peking to deliver the first of three 7475P aircraft costing $60 million each. He was on his way home via Hong Kong, London and New York City when the Pentagon announced its decision.

While growing up in Missouri, Wilson used to try to flatten dollar bills under his pillow before taking them off to the bank. With that same tightfisted search for no-wrinkles efficiency, he has engineered Boeing's success.

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